The Mayne Inheritance

by Rosamond Siemon

  Despite their grand outward appearance, perhaps partly because of it, a mantle of new suspicion gradually enveloped them. It was said that all was not right within the walls of ‘‘Moorlands’’. Men came and went, the sounds of parties were heard; the over-protected Mary Emelia, never quite maturing to a stable middle-aged woman and lacking the intelligence of her three clever brothers, was disciplined from time to time. The neighbours kept their distance. Isaac and James had always taken great pride in the gardens at ‘‘Moorlands’’, and despite the new chill in people’s attitude, Isaac continued as Vice President of the Horticultural Society of Queensland. The effort to maintain an outwardly normal life could not have been easy. It is possible that at this time, the stress of gossip, isolation and guilt began to disable his finely balanced psyche. There seems to have been a gradual but noticeable change in his behaviour.

  Writing of the period, Neil Byrne notes that by the late 1880s the Australian-born Irish Catholics in Brisbane were better placed financially and socially than their immigrant parents. He lists some twenty families in the highest levels of Brisbane society, whose members had achieved their goals in the law, medicine, the civil service and commerce. A.J. Thynne, one of Fr Dunne’s pupils, was Minister for Justice; Patrick Real was a puisne judge. In the 1890s education was an important factor in determining exclusiveness, and these men were respected and accepted community leaders.

  The three Mayne men, who had as good or better financial and educational advantages, met these families at church and probably did business with many of them, but they remained outsiders. This was despite the fact that, along with many leading professional men of the time whose education had given them a sense of noblesse oblige, Dr James Mayne, an acclaimed surgeon at the General Hospital, accepted the responsibility of setting an example by accepting leadership and other offices in several clubs and societies for the public at large. He had entered a caring profession and he cared about every group with which he came in contact. He gave considerable spare time, as well as money for equipment and prizes, to the organisations to which he belonged. In 1895 he was a Member of the Executive of the Queensland National Association. In 1898 he was elected one of the Vice Presidents of the National Cricket Union, and continued as Vice President of the Queensland Cricket Union from 1901 to 1907. From 1898 to 1902 he held the same office with the Brisbane Bicycle Club, and from 1902 to 1903 with the Brisbane Rowing Club.

  There were probably many times when James wished himself free of his family and back in the anonymity of London, but his strong sense of responsibility bound him to them. One of his strengths lay in the fact that he had a perceptive and generous understanding of his fellow man. Masking the strain of his private life became a habit. It enabled him to relate more comfortably with his colleagues at the Brisbane General Hospital, where his professional ability was highly regarded. It is on record that the testy Medical Superintendent, Dr E. Sandford Jackson, who demanded efficiency and a high standard, considered him the best assistant at operations that he had ever had. It is also on record that as a resident medical officer, his salary financed the hospital’s first X-ray plant. Following his promotion to Medical Superintendent in 1899, he gave all his salary to improvements to the hospital buildings and grounds. Perhaps, like William, he did not waste energy dreaming of the pleasures of a social life relaxing with his contemporaries. The family’s basic insecurity, driven by the power of popular gossip, directed the pattern of their life. It was more comfortable to ride with the tide than to resist it.

  The tide of gossip ebbed and flowed and strange stories continued to swirl in malevolent currents around them. In honouring the sensible 1865 suggestion that none of them should marry, the Maynes gave substance to the idea that they were all tainted, and this provided a base for the apocryphal murder stories that continued to circulate and protract their stigmatisation. The most frequently heard stories—that are still told—include one in which Patrick murdered an employee and disposed of the body in his mincing machine. No one ever explained how large bones or a head could be crushed in a mid-nineteenth century hand-turned mincer. Another story had one of Patrick’s sons arguing with a brother at the butchery and throwing him into a vat of boiling-down fat. This anonymous culprit is said to have taken refuge in the priesthood. The fact that at Patrick’s death his three sons were still schoolboys, one as young as four years, was overlooked. And none of them was attracted to a cloistered life.

  A Moggill legend, using echoes of the Cox murder, insists that Isaac, a scallywag, held poker and drinking parties on the floating sugar mill Walrus, which anchored at riverside sugar farms for the cane to be crushed on board. When a card cheat was discovered, he left the ship and was later found dismembered at the bottom of a well. A supposed inquest concluded that the expert dismembering was done by either a butcher or a doctor, both skills belonging to members of Isaac’s supposed party. Again and again these echoes of 1848 are transferred in time and place to prop up an anti-Mayne story. The Walrus was small, ninety-six foot long, and somewhat narrow. She had been at times a two-masted schooner and a paddle-wheel steamer, and was refitted in 1869 with a one horse-power engine and a large sugar-crushing machine. There was scant room for the crew, certainly no room for passengers, let alone for them to hold parties. No doubt, once she was anchored at sugar farms along the Brisbane, Logan or Albert rivers, the crew liked to gamble with the locals. The unnamed doctor at the card party could not have been James. Walrus was broken up in 1879, while he was still a schoolboy. It is possible that Isaac attended such card games but he was a solicitor, not a butcher, and it would have been a rough, very long horse or carriage ride from Toowong to Moggill or the downstream farms in order to play a game of cards. No date or year, victim’s name, or site of the supposed body’s recovery has ever been offered, and no inquest in that period fits the crime. The Moggill legend, like so many other stories, can be considered highly questionable.

  Throughout most of those years there was strong Protestant antagonism to the Irish and to Catholics, and most of these stories have an anti-Catholic slant. It is reflected in one of the oldest Mayne stories, that the priest-confessor gave absolution to the murderer, Patrick, on condition that his edict that the children should not marry be obeyed. All these stories are fabrications. Unfortunately, many of the family’s fellow-Catholics chose to believe them and withheld friendship. The isolation that stemmed from this found its own outlet. The three sons moved into a life that brought more stress, anxiety, and regrettably, violence. Patrick’s sons had none of his cocky self-assertiveness to ride over other people’s opinion of them. Their father’s abuse of his children, whether mental, moral or physical, had left them with differing coping strategies. With Isaac, it was a time-bomb of pent-up aggression. William, who enjoyed female company, sought sanctuary as a recluse, sheltering from a tempting world. Mary Emelia now seemed content to let the world pass her by. When James strove for a normal life he was to discover the balancing act between self and the world very tricky.

  There seems no doubt that for some years Isaac and James were living what at that time had to be the double life of homosexuals. There was a flourishing homosexual sub-culture in Brisbane, with known points of pick-up at lavatories near the wharf on the south bank, and at the Australian Steam Navigation Company’s wharf in Margaret Street. Closer to Isaac’s office in Queen Street was the lavatory block used by the staff of hardware merchants Alfred Shaw and Company. That firm had a large staff, including teenagers and young men. Some of them, with other townsmen who frequented the lavatory, came to police notice in 1892.

  At that time homosexual acts were regarded as abominable crimes punishable by imprisonment; in medical circles, homosexuality was sometimes considered a form of insanity. Some medical practitioners insisted that homosexuality was an illness which could be cured by electroconvulsive aversion therapy or by castration. The merest suggestion of being involved in such a life meant social suicide. Unspoken knowledge of the Maynes�
� involvement in such a life was probably a factor in their social non-acceptance. They certainly had little social position to lose, but the opprobrium heaped on any known offender made them exceedingly cautious. Their private life seems to have been conducted at home, where a six-foot closed plank fence was erected inside the white picket boundary fence and kept the identity of visitors from prying eyes. Unfortunately this new secretiveness provided more fuel for the inquisitive and the rumourmongers. Such people had little to build on, however, and had it not been for a deterioration in Isaac’s mental health, the family might eventually have been left in relative peace.

  For William, even that kind of illusory peace brought little balm. In January 1897 the Mayne family went on yet another of their holidays to New Zealand—a country where their story was not known, not gossiped about, where they could relax and enjoy a carefree holiday.

  William and James both had the classicist’s eye for beauty and as the family embarked on a scenic coach tour of both islands, two Australian women joined the group. The younger, Florence Davidson, the travelling companion of a Miss Crompton Roberts, was not only stylish and attractive but an intelligent young woman with a keen sense of fun. She came from Parramatta.

  By train, steamer, coach and canoe the travelling party was thrown together. They found extra time for long walks in the evening, singing at the hotel piano, and quiet conversation over supper. Group photographs show clearly that they were a congenial company. By the end of the second week William alone was escorting his sister and Florence Davidson on the evening walks. He bought her sweets, a Christmas book and perfume. He stayed late with her in hotel sitting rooms to play cards or to chat, and as Florence’s diary records: ‘‘Mr William Mayne and I sat in the back of the coach and we had fun’’.

  On a bone-shaking sixty-five-mile coach trip to Longford, Florence was distressed with travel sickness and William did all he could to make her comfortable. James, the doctor, either saw no need to offer his professional aid or had advised William on how to treat her needs.

  At Christchurch, during the last few days of the group’s tour Florence’s diary notes that William was very kind and generous, and that he spent time alone with her. At Dunedin his four weeks of being attentive to a beautiful young woman came to an abrupt end. The Maynes returned to Australia. Florence, who may have hoped to win the heart of the handsome bachelor, suddenly found her days empty. She complained sadly to her diary: ‘‘I feel as if I had lost a shilling and picked up threepence for the next three days. We miss the Maynes. At least I do very much.’’

  In honouring the Mayne family decision that none should marry, the strain on William was probably greater than on Isaac and James who found a different outlet for their sexuality.

  Two years later the twenty-four-year-old Florence, no doubt wondering why her hopes for romance had ended so abruptly, set out for Brisbane to renew acquaintance with the Maynes. She was a young lady with good social contacts and with her friend, Kathleen Betts, sailed from Sydney on the steamer Cintra. They spent a month with the Boyd family in their home in the grounds of the Immigration Depot next to the imposing ‘‘Yungaba’’, at Kangaroo Point.

  Florence had barely unpacked before she prevailed on Mr Boyd to show her over the Brisbane Hospital where Dr James Mayne was Superintendent. Sadly she did not sight him but she was impressed with the new Lady Lamington Nurses Home for which James Mayne had donated the most comfortable furniture and financed the landscaping of the grounds.

  In the busy whirl of Brisbane’s winter social season the girls were squired by several eligible young men including Fitz and Cecil Brenan, sons of the Immigration Officer, Mat Cokeley who took them sailing on his yacht, Mr Pring Roberts and others who variously escorted them to receptions at Government House and Bishopbourne polo matches at Ascot, the Masonic Ball and dances. They also attended musical ‘‘at homes’’.

  The non-stop entertainment did not deter Florence from her main aim. When she spied William and Mary Emelia in their carriage in town and was not seen by them, she, an Anglican, decided to attend Sunday service at the Roman Catholic cathedral. It was a pleasantly surprised Mary Emelia, not the accompanying William, who invited her to afternoon tea at ‘‘Moorlands’’. Pleased to have a congenial friend visit her, Mary Emelia invited Florence back a week later for luncheon and tennis. William did not appear.

  Knowing of the Brisbane family Florence stayed with, virtually on the site of his father’s brutal crime, and of the rejection of his family by the establishment families Florence was seeing, William realised that any anonymity the Maynes had in New Zealand was now gone. The sins of the father and all the other hurtful gossip would by now be part of Florence Davidson’s enlightenment. He was long practised in withdrawing from an unkind world.

  Three days before Florence and her friend returned to Sydney she spent a final afternoon playing tennis at ‘‘Moorlands’’. In the twilight William escorted her across the lawn to Auchenflower station. The diary is eloquently silent on their parting.

  At the end of 1898, Dr Sandford Jackson decided to retire as Superintendent of the Brisbane General Hospital. His successor was to be the Resident Medical Officer, Dr James Mayne, now thirty-eight. In view of the family’s unhappy background of rumour and innuendo, and the fact that there was another contender for the position, his appointment can only have been on merit. This was testimony to the worth of the real James; the man who might have made his name in the medical field had he not been finally overwhelmed by the actions of Isaac.

  The Superintendent’s role, with a staff of sixty and more than a dozen honorary medical officers, placed James in a more public position. He was invited to join various committees and held office on them. As he was a bachelor he chose to relinquish the more spacious Superintendent’s house to the three resident medical officers, and elected to live in the hospital cottage.

  The autocratic Dr Jackson’s combination of a private practice with his position as Hospital Superintendent had given rise to a controversial state of affairs which the Hospital Committee was not prepared to condone with any new appointee. In 1899 there was a general tightening of rules; James, living at the hospital, was expected never to absent himself for more than six hours a day. It was a restriction which could have posed difficulties when he was needed at ‘‘Moorlands’’ during some of Isaac’s erratic episodes. His transport for the six dusty miles from the hospital was horse-drawn, so any emergency overnight stays at his Toowong home would have been difficult. Over the next four years there were times when a family crisis demanded his time and he was torn between his own professional life and shouldering responsibility for the disquieting behaviour of his family. His record and his colleagues’ freely-given praise indicate that he was successfully filling his role.

  A photograph taken at this time shows no outward sign of stress. James was a tolerably handsome man with a large head and strong, definite features but was quite dissimilar to his father. His thinning hair was a lighter brown and his firm jawline and calm face, featuring a fashionable guardsman moustache, gave an impression of quiet strength. His nineteenth-century imperialist education had imbued him with the ideals of duty, loyalty, honour and chivalry—but, given the stark reality of the Maynes’ family life, his ideals and his professional ambition were to be sorely tested.

  By the end of 1902, after only four years in his position as Superintendent, James had to make a decision about Isaac’s deteriorating mental health. The whole family would go for a trip to England. It was a cover to seek medical help for his fifty-one year old brother. The decision to seek such help abroad and not in Sydney or Melbourne was partly based on the secrecy the family always employed to screen their troubles from the inquisitive world. They continually sought anonymity. On 8 February 1903, James took six months’ leave of absence and Dr McLean stood in as Acting Superintendent. Aunt Ann was left to mind ‘‘Moorlands’’ while Mary Emelia and her three brothers sailed from Sydney on the India, bound for London.
The passenger list showed 241 people on board and listed Isaac Mayne as a married man with a double cabin. This was either an error, or his condition may have been such that he travelled with a nurse or other attendant.

  By July that year it seems they realised that the English doctors could do little to help Isaac. At a time when the family should have been on the high seas heading back to Australia, James cabled the hospital committee to request three months’ extension of his leave. Whether this cable came from America or whether they were travelling there is not indicated. The possibility that they sought help in the United States lies in the fact that in later years, Mary Emelia spoke of such a visit. No doubt she and William had an opportunity to enjoy the sights and comb the stores for many of the decorative items that graced their home. They were having nine months’ holiday, but for James it was a case of duty to the family and putting his professional ambition on hold. As a medical man he would not have seen Isaac’s hereditary problem in isolation. His own homosexuality (still considered a mental disease) would have concerned him. If a search for help in the best medical centres of the world was fruitless, the future for the Mayne brothers looked bleak.

  Back at the Brisbane Hospital in mid-November, James had much need of those few understanding colleagues with whom he could relax his guard and discuss the family affliction. There was a professional bond between him and his former superintendent, Dr Jackson, and with the Hospital Dispenser, Douglas Brown, both of whom occasionally visited ‘‘Moorlands’’. He was also able to confide in the tall, mannish Dr Lilian Cooper, Queensland’s first woman doctor, who arrived from Britain in 1891 with her female companion Mary Josephine Bedford. Their arrival in the year of James’ return from his studies may indicate that they had met in England. As a woman doctor, Lilian Cooper initially had difficulty in finding acceptance, and like James, she kept her private life to herself. The two had much in common and appear to have shared confidences. It was to Lilian Cooper that he confided there were three generations of madness in his family.